


How I wish I could tell you that I love you

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: But he's not getting one in this fic, Draco Malfoy Needs a Hug, Draco being really melodramatic, M/M, Mild Gore, Nature, Sadness, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 13:38:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18250955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Draco knew he shouldn't, but he liked to lie in the woodland and think upon his unrequited love.





	How I wish I could tell you that I love you

**Author's Note:**

> I'll warn you this is pretty terrible, there's no real structure and no real plot, like, I don't even know what you'd describe it as, so sorry for that, it just sort of happened.

The morning was cool on Draco’s face, there no rain in sight, and only a gentle haze of pink and yellow coiling around the trees, an unassuming brume that lapped the flowers like a seafoam. Draco sighed and watched his breath float up as though it were a butterfly to mix with the mist. Mornings could be so beautiful when the sun hit the trees just right, and it felt as though angels had arrived to walk upon the soil. Mornings could also be filled with potential, such latent possibilities. It was just a shame that none of these would ever be realised, that forever, mornings would remain unfulfilled dreams and hypothetical scenarios that Draco invented to save him from heartbreak. Harry Potter, that was the name of his not-lover, of his not-friend. It was so hard to make his tongue form words that could somehow describe Harry: though he knew he was as bright as the morning, he didn’t know why or how, just that when Harry smiled it was as though the sun was shining. He would cry at that thought. Big, ugly tears that could not be shed in polite company. Maybe that was why he came out here because it was far easier to cry when he was alone in the trees. Far easier to let his tears fall and water the moss when there was no one there to see. Sometimes he imagined that the moss could feel his pain, that somehow it knew he was crying salted tears and that was why it was so soft. To make him a pillow on which to cry for his hopeless dreams, his mornings of unfulfilled potential, all of which were so imbued with Harry’s name. 

Draco knew he should stop. That coming here day after day after day wasn’t so healthy, that one day he’d catch cold when he stayed out in the rain, and perhaps that cold would spread. Bury itself so deep in his lungs, burrowing down like maggots in the soil, that it would kill him one day, slowly and painfully, A gorgeously intimate death, where he learnt that sweet angel’s name, and it held his hand and stroked his hair as it rocked him into his death. Maybe that was what he really wanted, in the depths of his heart, to die, so exquisitely, so elegantly. To retune himself with nature’s purest symphony by dying at nature’s hand. And Draco knew, he was never going to stop, not until he died. Not until he was no longer capable of continuing. Though maybe he was being melodramatic, for his transgression was a simple one. Draco’s single iniquity was lying in the trees near his home, with his hands lost in the spread of bluebells, his mind turning over and over, pondering a love that wasn’t his. That was all it was, unrequited love. Two words that said so much more than their literal meaning. Watching the purple haze of bluebells and running his fingers ever so gently up a single stalk, Draco knew that here, when he was alone, would be the only time he dared to murmur his unrequited lover’s name. For if others heard him say it, then, well he did not know what their reactions would be, but he couldn’t imagine they would always be kind. They would ask how someone like him could fall for someone like Harry, and other people, the realists of the world, would ask how he could possibly think that someone like Harry would fall for someone like him. 

He simply wasn’t worthy of Harry’s love. The line that separated right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral, was ever so thin. What right did he have to declare which side he was on? What right did any of them have to say where nature had placed them? Draco would have liked to think of himself as inherently good, that the bad things he had done were a result of coercion, a deep-seated compulsion brought on by cruelty and neglect. But he also knew that there were others who were stronger, others who had protested when they were just as young as him, and that he had not fought, merely complied. Did that make him a bad person? Did that mean his fate was now defined, that his destiny was drawn in the stars and, no matter what he did, it would not change? Staring up at the sky, Draco could almost see the stars, and he had to wonder whether there was a god, up somewhere in that sky. Did that figure see him, lying in the flowers, wondering, praying that he was gifted with some virtue on which to pledge his love. But if there was a god, then Draco knew that it was cruel, that it took pleasure in the suffering of humanity, and was no better than the shadow that would forever stain his heart. Draco wished, more than anything, that he could sit beside Harry and be taught how to obtain that natural virtue, that innate goodness that Harry seemed to exude with such ease. That was all he wished for, simple things like that. 

What Draco also wished for, and maybe he was selfish to do so, was more time. More opportunities to explore who he was, and what he wanted, before his time ran out. Though, when he watched the sun slowly slide across the sky he had to wonder, what really was time but the beating of a butterfly’s wing? So simple and minuscule and yet potentially world-changing. What was time but the soaring of a bird across the sky? Its gentle glide filled with elegance and grace that could never be emulated by humans. What was time but a droplet of dew sliding from a daffodil’s petal? Draco watched as it dripped onto his hand. Time was but an illusion and Draco would lie there until it blurred, and hours could have passed or merely seconds. Perhaps linear time was not the reality, perhaps it was just the easiest comprehensible way of living, for how could linearity explain how Draco had had his heart broken before he had really fallen in love. How he knew from the very first flutter of his heart, that it would be torn in two. In reality, time was not the slipping of the sun across the sky, time was as fluid as the spring water that bubbled deep in the forest. Though maybe this liquid time wasn’t fit for human consumption, that human brains could not comprehend the complexities of what time really was because it was made for the gods. Draco would never know the real answer to these questions, but when he lay in the trees thinking of such things, time was not of the essence, and his thoughts were free to wander the very darkest and emptiest paths that they dared to find within his skull. Though he could hardly act surprised when they always came back to the same thoughts. Time may have been an infinite fluidity, but it would never be long enough to get Harry out of his mind because Harry seemed to be interwoven with the very fabric of time. 

Draco watched as a sparrow flitted between the branches, a simple thing, so free from the world of responsibilities. He wondered whether its heart was still capable of breaking. Whether all the dead sparrows that existed in the world had died of broken hearts. Maybe they had? But they would never know. There were so many things about nature that most people never saw because most people did not take the time to look. They did not notice the smaller things because they did not lie, day after day, out in the world, hoping for a miracle. Hoping that for no reason at all the object of their hopeless affections would notice them, would perhaps even requite their love. But most people did not do that, so most people did not see. They did not see how the sun made the flowers dance, making all the colours of spring collide and mash together in what should have been carnage, but somehow managed to be so gorgeous. Neither did they see the common shrew as it weaved between the bluebells, knocking the stalks ever so slightly, so that the heads swayed and the petals sometimes fell. Draco thought Harry was like a shrew, common and yet so adorable; somehow, he managed to be everything that Draco liked and yet so completely oblivious to his affections. Perhaps then, it was really Draco who was like the shrew, too shy to be seen, too scared to show his face just in case Harry did not feel the same. 

Those who’d never experienced the gentle squeeze of unrequited love could not understand how it could bring such pain. It had to be experienced to be believed. It hurt. Hurt more than any flesh wound ever would, because flesh would heal, stitch itself together again. Love was different. Draco had given half his heart away to someone who didn’t even care for him, and now that part of him was lost forever. It wasn’t like a perennial flower that would germinate again in one spring’s time, that small part of him was gone, given to someone else, and there was nothing he could do about it. Draco would just have to live his life with half a heart. It was on days like this, when the world seemed to be basked in such a romantic light, and all the birds seemed to sing for their lovers, that Draco wished the ground would swallow him. That as he lay there, watching the sky, the moss that made his pillow would grow, spread across his hands, and flowers would sprout from his body, until he became the nature that seemed to understand him so well. Draco was under no illusion, however ever romantic the world seemed to glow, he knew he would be more worth in nature than ever in humanity. Under the soil with roots coursing through his veins, he could feed the trees, even above ground if he stayed ever so still here at night for long enough then perhaps the creatures of this place would come to him. He could provide them with sustenance, nourish their bodies with his own. Foxes could maul at his stomach, and the owls could pick at his ribs, and come the sunrise the creatures of the day could look upon his corpse as a great victim of love, and a fatality of half a heart.


End file.
